The Supreme Court won’t be settling the question of whether people between the ages of 18 and 20 can be barred from carrying guns in public — at least not for now.
On April 21, the court declined to hear Worth v. Jacobson, letting stand an appeals court ruling that struck down Minnesota’s age requirements for permits to carry concealed guns.
A stay had been in place during the appeals process, allowing Minnesota to continue enforcing its age requirements. By denying Minnesota’s request to consider the case, the justices effectively lifted the state’s de facto ban on 18- to 20-year-olds carrying handguns in public. Now, the state must start accepting permit applications from young adults.
“This is a resounding victory for 18-20-year-old adults who wish to exercise their constitutional right to bear arms,” Bryan Strawser, chair of the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus, a gun rights group, said in a statement.
Gun safety advocates had hoped the court would take up the case and reverse the ruling from the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals. Legal experts also watched closely, with some believing the justices would want to settle a widening split among lower courts on gun-related age limits.
“I was a little surprised in that respect,” said Joseph Blocher, a constitutional law professor at Duke University and a co-founder of the Duke Center for Firearms Law. “But the justices have a lot of different gun issues to choose from. Maybe they just decided either to wait it out or to pick one of the other ones first.”
The Trace has compiled data on more than 1,600 federal court challenges to gun laws since the Supreme Court’s 2022 Bruen decision dramatically expanded gun rights, sparking a wave of lawsuits. The data shows that more than a dozen federal district courts have also reached divergent conclusions on age restriction cases.
Over the past three years, the Supreme Court has shown a greater appetite for Second Amendment cases, ruling on gun bans for domestic violence abusers, rapid-fire bump stocks, and restrictions on “ghost guns.” None of the justices wrote separately to explain why they refused to hear the Minnesota case, as sometimes happens, particularly in high-profile challenges.
Gun dealers have been prohibited from selling handguns to 18- to 20-year-olds since Congress passed the Gun Control Act in 1968. Under federal law, it’s legal for that age group to possess or use handguns, or to buy them from friends or family or in other so-called private transactions. Some states have stricter laws that prohibit all sales or possession for people under 21.
At least two other appeals courts have found age restrictions unconstitutional in the past year. The 3rd Circuit struck down a Pennsylvania restriction on 18- to 20-year-olds carrying guns in public during states of emergency, and the 5th Circuit invalidated the federal ban on licensed dealers selling guns to people under 21.
However, a 10th Circuit panel backed a Colorado age restriction last November, and earlier this year, the 11th Circuit upheld Florida’s ban on gun sales to people under 21. The 11th Circuit case is likely to be petitioned to the Supreme Court.
Megan Walsh, director of the Gun Violence Prevention Law Clinic at the University of Minnesota, said the cases raise several unresolved Second Amendment questions that she expects the justices will eventually want to resolve.
“I don’t think this is a final answer on age-limit cases from the Supreme Court,” she said about the Minnesota case. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that a majority of justices think that the 8th Circuit approach was correct. I think it might just not be the right vehicle for questions that are going to have to be answered by the Supreme Court sooner rather than later.”
Andrew Willinger, the executive director of the Duke Center for Firearms Law, said the Supreme Court may have passed on the Minnesota case because it involved age limits on carrying guns, not purchasing them — a distinction that could be legally significant.
In Bruen, the Supreme Court declared that modern gun laws need historical precedent to be constitutional. A case about purchasing age limits may have more historical evidence for the justices to consider, Willinger said, or the justices may prefer a case that gets at both purchasing and carrying.
“They may still take up the issue,” he said. “I just think that the justices seem to be exhibiting some kind of desire to get a fair amount of lower court input before they weigh in.”
The Supreme Court’s refusal to take the Minnesota case could spur lawsuits against similar age limits elsewhere.
“It will be an impetus for gun rights groups to challenge these types of restrictions to the extent that they’re on the books in other states and haven’t been challenged,” Willinger said.
